An enthused crowd filled hpgrp Gallery in Chelsea last Thursday at the opening of Resolution, Katsuhiro Saiki's show of both older and never before seen works. Digital and analog photographs taken in New York, Tokyo, and Berlin are the raw materials for his brand of photo/sculpture hybrids. The centerpiece of the exhibition "Place #3" (2002) is a photograph Saiki took in Berlin of the underbelly of a distant plane flying through a cotton candy clouded sky. The photo is dramatically presented in the middle of the gallery floor, mounted on a large tile. To see an upward view when looking down is truly dizzying.
For Saiki's "Frames" series he photographs glass and steel skyscraper facades, then cuts and arranges them onto white background to create abstract 3D polygonal structures. He effectively captures a 3D object into a 2D photograph form, then crafts it into the illusion of 3D again. This series among many of his other works seems to be informed by Sol Lewitt's 2D cube drawings.
Resolution is now on at hpgrp Gallery in Chelsea through January 28th.
Roundway Hill, Wiltshire, July 23rd, 2011 viaSteve Alexander
Steve Alexander is one of the world’s foremost crop circle documentarians. This month he joins Skink Ink Fine Art in Williamsburg for Rural Graffiti, an exhibition of his photographic prints. Alexander shows his striking aerial photographs of crop circles from the past three summers in the UK, where a majority of these formations have occurred since the 1970s. He reveals the massive scale and flawless geometric shapes that are undetectable from the ground, providing professional records of a temporary artform to media, researchers, and the public. The gallery exhibits thirty of them, many of which are blown up past poster size.
See Rural Graffiti at Skink Ink Fine Art in Williamsburg through November 27th.
Amanda Dow Thompson’s latest show at Causey Contemporary is an examination of transience and permanence when light shines through her sculptures and creates shadows as dynamic as a prism’s rainbow. The sculptures of carved wood, cast resin and cast glass hang from the center of the gallery ceiling. The dreamy resin and glass ones look like double helixes, while the wooden ones feel like some bone hybrid of rib cage and spine, columnal and swirling, support systems that are somehow delicate themselves. Light projects through them as they slowly spin, casting blurred organic shapes. On the wall are Andrew Garn’s photographs of these shadows, cast with colored light creating a more kaleidoscopic version of the live view behind it.
Ghost Moth is now on view at Causey Contemporary in Williamsburg through November 6th
In his latest series Pictures of Magazines 2, Brooklyn-based Vik Muniz continues his practice of photographing his own found object mosaic works. Muniz is the subject of last year’s Academy Award-nominated documentary Waste Land. The film chronicles the artist’s return to his native Brazil where he finds inspiration for his next project on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Muniz befriends catadores (pickers of recyclable materials) at Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest landfill, and hires them as artist assistants to arrange garbage into giant portraits of fellow catadores.
At Sikkema Jenkins & Co, Muniz instead recreates iconic imagery out of torn magazine pages and the result is surprisingly painterly. Each tear replaces the gesture of a brushstroke as the topography mimics globs of paint. Thousands of decontextualized media scraps become a visual miscellany suggesting a constant stream of updates. When arranged into the likeness of a single work, once labored over by a single artist, Muniz seems to point out a discrepancy of focus and value over time.
Pictures of Magazines 2 is now on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co in Chelsea until October 15th.
In From Darkness to Light, David LaChapelle hopes to “resuscitate the figure from its current state of commodity.” The photographer and director actually began his artistic career in galleries before Andy Warhol launched him into fame with a job at Interview Magazine. Like Warhol, LaChapelle playfully splashes in both commercial and conceptual puddles to stir together a highly distinctive concoction.
At the Lever House lobby, LaChapelle takes his primary medium of photography back to kindergarten art class with paper chains, collage, and stickers. In “Chain of Life,” LaChapelle replaces construction paper with photographs of the human form, stapled together into swooping and cascading strings that create a celebratory visual of human connectedness. In “Raft of Illusion, Raging Toward Truth,” he combines watercolor, pencil, paper, and glossy prints of his own staged photographs and mounts them on varying numbers of cardboard layers to create a 3D take on French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault’sThe Raft of Medusa. Epic in both size and subject, the ceiling-high collage of cut outs and art class materials showcases LaChapelle’s eye for the surreal. In “Adam & Eve” he arranges tinted translucent stickers of nudes into two circles (separated by sex) on the glass walls of the lobby. The forms swim around each other in a distinctly cell-like mosaic that create an effect of a church’s stained glass window through a microscope, conjuring at once images of science and religion. LaChapelle’s vision of interconnectedness and enlightenment through a youthful lens makes for a compelling experience.
From Darkness to Light is now on view at Lever House in midtown through September 30th.
Brooklyn-based photographer Brea Souders has a truly special eye. Though viewing her somewhat abstract images may require a squint and tilt of the head, it's hardly a confounding or isolating experience. The consistent vibrance and refinement of her vision makes each photo feel like an invitation to distinguish and appreciate her artistic perspective.
"Yellow Paint Samples (creating light post-breakup)" from photo series Constellation viaBrea Souders
Souders' work often takes on autobiographical themes, from her heritage to concrete experiences. Above "Yellow Paint Samples (creating light post-breakup)" for example is an ode to the urge to paint her kitchen yellow after ending a six-year relationship with her boyfriend. It's refreshing when an artist is transparent, isn't it?
Souders also has varied publication and fashion photography credits to her name, including New York Magazine, Paste and Vogue Paris.
See more on her website (I especially recommend Islands & Streams, her photo series that recreates scenes from dream journals of well-known figures) or at Pop-Up Show at OpenSpace in Tribeca through the end of July.
"This project began from the theory that humans are made of cosmic matter as a result of a stars death. I created imagery that showcased this cosmic birth through the use of dust and reflective confetti to create galaxies."
I love GIFs as high art. These are making my heart sing! See the rest of Torres' project Stellar in all its ethereal glory.
Ai Weiwei outside Tompkins Square Park, 1986 via Asia Society
Celebrate the release of Ai Weiwei from Chinese government detainment by seeing over 200 of his photographs from his time as a New Yorker. They're now on view at Asia Society Museum until August 14th.
See more photos from Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs here.
Rouge 58 is a brand new gallery and pop up show room in Williamsburg. Currently on view is FANATIC: Recent Works and Fan Art by Ruvan Wijesooriya. There are dozens of photographic prints and collaborations with illustrators that are "made to be accessible to new art collectors"!
Laurel Nakadateanswers to “happy self-portraits people make day after day with with their cell phone cameras and post on Facebook” with 356 Days: A Catalogue of Tears. Every single day in 2010 she took photos of herself before, during, and after weeping in her apartment and on planes, trains, and hotel rooms around the world. Some show her photography training and some have a mobile upload feel. She appears nude and clothed, bawling and welling up. The variety prevents a single daily act from ever becoming repetitive, portraying a true spectrum of sadness. It’s an impressive piece of performance art that shows stamina, discipline, and tenderness.
You might spot him in the 5th Avenue 50s straddling his bike, sporting a blue jacket (which is actually a Parisian street sweeper uniform), as he snaps a photo of some dazzling ensemble. But whether or not you can catch this 82-year-old in real life, see “Bill Cunningham New York,” the documentary portrait of the city’s most beloved street fashion photographer.
The doc follows Cunningham on his bike, weaving precariously helmetless in and out of midtown traffic. We see him in The New York Times office where his photos are distilled into the weekly style roundup “On The Street” and the high society event page “Evening Hours.” Interviews with New York fashion staples Anna Wintour, Patrick MacDonald, Annie Flanders, and more round out this sweet peak into Cunningham’s life. The central paradox at play is that he documents and works alongside the most glamorous people and institutions in one of the world’s fashion capitals, but he himself leads an ascetic life. He attends church every Sunday, eats few and modest meals, has about two changes of clothes, and lives in what looks like a janitor’s closet filled with file cabinets of his own negatives. We see him repair his ripped rain poncho with masking tape. He’s not so unaware as to not laugh at himself, but he’d never be wasteful for the sake of pride.
Some of the best scenes take place at the Times, where Bill and his assistant design the layout of his “On the Street” page. “Switch these two,” is the incessant phrase over the shoulder of the openly (though affably) frustrated lumberjack of a man accommodating the man’s whims click and drag after click and drag. These odd couple-y moments highlight Cunningham’s creaky methods being double-timed by a new generation of digital cameras and Photoshop. But Cunningham has been doing it his way since he got home from World War II and no one’s stopping him.
Cunningham seamlessly embodies the whimsy of a child and the wisdom of an old man. The duality allows him the moxie to embrace a single, simple passion and to do it everyday for over 60 years with monk-like devotion. To play a straight game in New York, he reflects, is like “Don Quixote fighting windmills.” And it’s true. Life can be tough here and we compromise ourselves to make ends meet or to roll with a certain crowd. But Bill knows neither greed nor opportunism. In the humblest possible way he demonstrates that it’s possible to honor your passion by keeping it the top priority, if you’re willing to improvise. If you let that be the great challenge, rather than a daily grind you fall into, life can be simple and beautiful.
